Eminence Grise of Hurricane Forecasting

From his office at Colorado State University at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and 65 miles north of Denver, William M. Gray pioneered the concept of "seasonal" hurricane forecasting -- predicting months in advance the severity of the coming hurricane season. Gray's prognostications, issued since 1983, are used by insurance companies to calculate premiums, media outlets to remind coastal residents of the hazards of bad weather, and even storm window manufacturers who have cited the forecasts in their sales pitches.

This year he predicts nine hurricanes, with a 55% chance of landfall in the United States. He will update that forecast Wednesday.

Gray, 76, is a throwback in the field of climatology. He eschews the elaborate mathematical models that are increasingly used to predict weather, preferring to scour through the thick files of historical storm data that cram his office. He's the sort who reads old maps of storm patterns for fun rather than booting up his laptop, and embarks on frantic searches for old academic papers while proclaiming that "a professor should never be able to find anything in his office."

"The whole secret is to look globally," Gray, who once hoped to be a geographer, said of his forecasting methods. He looks at the rainfall in West Africa, the water temperature in the Pacific, whether it has been warm in the northeastern United States. "If you combine all these things, there's some memory that the atmosphere has of what's going to come in the future."

That global mind-set may help explain how Gray has been able to spend most of his professional life about as far from saltwater and tropical humidity as is possible in the continental U.S. Gray has traveled all over the world in his studies, but he always returns to the landlocked Fort Collins campus, which has, paradoxically, become a national powerhouse in training tropical storm forecasters.

"You don't have to live on the surface of Mars to study its atmosphere," Gray said in an interview.